Julianna Barwick

The Magic Place by Julianna Barwick

MIST048 THE MAGIC PLACE
by JULIANNA BARWICK

Singing in church choirs while growing up in rural Louisiana, Julianna Barwick loved how it felt to be in the middle of the chorus: in harmonious unity, swallowed up by sound. Her music attempts to recreate that sensation solo by using a loop station — an effects unit that layers sounds infinitely — to become a one-woman choir. Her ambient music is peer to fellow loopers such as Animal Collective bro Panda Bear and somnambulist droner Grouper but it’s very much its own thing. Barwick constructs opaque audio atmospheres from swarms of heavenly harmonies and cloudy drones, making music equal parts canonical and environmental. After two records testing these waters (2007’s Sanguine and 2009’s Florine), Barwick is the master of her idiosyncratic domain on The Magic Place. Named after a childhood birch, in the branches of which she would retreat into fantasy. The LP taps into imagination and escape, its rapturous suite of tone-songs — with apt names such as Envelop and Cloak — suggest cinema, the subconscious, transcendence, the firmament, heaven and any other realm of mystery and mysticism. – THE AGE (4.5 stars)